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This story features images taken during the Embryology Advanced Research Training Course at the MBL and quotes Carol LaBonne, longtime faculty and current course co-director.

The coolest, most complicated machine is not an airplane, electric car or robot vacuum cleaner.

It’s you.

“You built yourself from a single cell, which no machine has ever had to do,” said Carole LaBonne, the president-elect for the Society for Developmental Biology and a professor at Northwestern University.

After fertilization, a cell goes on autopilot. It knows how to divide, multiply, differentiate — become a specific cell type — and organize itself into a complex, multicellular organism.

It’s the ultimate origin story.

So far, how this occurs, especially given the millions of ways embryonic development can go wrong, is still a mystery. But in an age of cutting-edge CRISPR gene editing; sophisticated microscopy; cheaper, faster DNA sequencing; advanced comparative genomics; and computational modeling; scientists are closing in on solving the puzzle.

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